It seems very strange to me, looking back at that mortal portion of my existence, to think that I could, standing as I was on the very lip of eternity, give myself over to petty annoyance. But mortal humanity cannot ever prepare itself for death, for the very good reason that we can only prepare for events with which we are familiar, or which we can comprehend, and our own death is neither of these things. Until we are dead we will stubbornly believe, in some corner of our consciousness, that we will continue living; and once we are dead it is, naturally, too late to believe anything at all. As the mechanical fuse marked off the last remaining second of my life I was aware, of course, that I had failed. I found it was possible to bring all my consciousness into the focal point of the cigarette at my mouth. I drew a very last lungful of smoke. Of all the cigarettes I had smoked before, this may have been the most simply pleasurable. Previously I had either been aware that I was smoking, an awareness tinged necessarily with guilt at the harmful effects the foul stuff was having upon me, or else I had smoked from automatic, unconscious habit, as I concentrated upon something else, in which case I was hardly aware that I was smoking at all. But for that one perfect moment, on the edge of death, I could suck the tobacco into my lungs knowing that, since I was dying anyway, it could do me no harm. I began to breathe out a tentacle of smoke, and with the smoke blew away all my anger. It felt like a lifetime’s anger. And, in that perfect moment, two thoughts occurred to me. One was the purest optimism, and it was this: The grenade may be a dud. The other, which seemed to spool naturally from that first, was: I shall ask him simply to replace the pin, and he will do this. As to why I believed I would be able to persuade Trofim to do this, I’m not sure. It came into my head as clearly, and purely, as a revelation. It was all I needed to do. I started to turn my head, saying, ‘Com—’
I heard just the start of a roar; no more than a split second before it vanished entirely from my sensorium, or else before my sensorium vanished entirely. The material solidity of the space we were in was deconstructed and reconstructed as light, clear and bright and warm, alive and bright and warm. It was pure light. I did not have time to think, the grenade has detonated, Chernobyl has exploded — I did not, then, have time to think anything at all because there was no time at all. Time had evaporated. Instead of time there was the experience, filtered as if through memory, of white light and white heat, the rushing and beating upon me of great waves, monumental tides, of white light and white heat. A process of replacing every single one of the carbon atoms in my body with photons; and a reverberating pulse that swarmed upon the net of my nerves.
When I was a child, I had believed that death was a red-haired man.
Out of perfect whiteness and the perfection of the light a single point of sensual connection began to coalesce; one unsullied, soprano musical note, a musical note as pure as mathematics, like an angel singing, a spirit-entity heralding my arrival in a new place.
PART THREE
‘Жumъ cmaлo лyuwe, mobapuщu. Жumъ cmaлo beceлee.’
‘[Life has got better, comrades! Life has become more joyful!]’
The clarity of this sustained, pure musical note was beautiful. Then it was insistent. Presently it became annoying.
I had been annoyed for much of my life. It occurred to me it made sense I would translate into the afterlife in the same state of mind.
‘Have you never wondered,’ somebody asked me, ‘why tinnitus manifests as a musical note in that manner?’
‘I have never wondered that,’ I said. ‘It has never occurred to me.’ I wasn’t speaking. The other voice wasn’t speaking. This was a new mode of existence, a new form of communication. Thought to thought. I had been translated into pure radiation.
‘It is, in effect, a malfunction of the inner ear,’ said my interlocutor.
I was in a new sort of space. An endlessly busy hurricane of light, with roaring, and then the roaring abruptly stopped. White, or bright whiteness speckled with a billion scuffs of bright grey. The musical note emerged from it, as pure as before. As pure as before. The violin sound had modulated, surfed a sinewave, intensifying and shrinking alternately. Like a squeaky wheel turning over and over.
It was a bird, singing in amongst the foliage.
Yes, there was foliage. It was like a poem by Fet. I walked through the light and it gradually coalesced into strands beneath my walking feet. The strands were bronze-coloured, not white, and then darker-coloured, and clearly it was grass. Strolling over grass, a slight upward incline, a long July hill leading up into brightness. ‘And now I shall meet the radiation aliens,’ I thought to myself. ‘I, who doubted their existence for so long!’
The upward slope of the hill invited me to keep walking. It was a peaceful rhythm, heatbeatlike; and it seemed to involve no physical effort. That was my first intimation that things were different. The sky above me was an intense yet milky blue, very bright, very right, and it did not hurt my eyes. The grass beneath my feet was the beer-coloured, though dry, central Russian summer pasture. The stems of the grass were soft as strands of hair. They reached to my ankles. It was an intensely pleasurable experience to walk through it.
I was coming up, in a leisurely way, to a dacha: exactly the same as the dacha in which I had spent those weeks, immediately after the war, with Sergei Rapoport, Adam Kaganovich, Nikolai Asterinov and the other person, whose name I could not then remember. But it was not exactly the same for, hovering above the low roof, very clearly visible against the bright sky, were two mighty letters:
Science Fiction, of course! How tremendously, how deeply exciting! At last I understood. I was approaching the mansion of science fiction itself. The radiation aliens, who had received my energetic engram (or whatever had happened to me inside the reactor) were now bringing me, in a profound sense, home. Naturally, I grasped the rightness of this. It had been in an earthly manifestation of this house that we, the writers of Soviet science fiction, had concocted the aliens in the first place. And the aliens had turned out to be real! We had channelled, without realising it, the true nature of the cosmos. We had articulated actuality and we had thought we had been writing fiction. We were hierophants of a hidden futurity, the pens that scribbled what they understood not. But in death — in my death — I had finally understood. The American, Coyne, had indeed been snatched up by aliens. There had been no rope. The rope had been a figment of my imagination, my way of rationalising the tractoring-beam of alien technology. My scepticism had corrupted my own experience, for the aliens were real. Trofim had not been babbling when he talked of them. And here they were! In this house! And I had invented them, or rather they had invented me. That last phrase made a trembly, hair-tickling, heart-thumping sense. They had written me, as I had written them. I had never stopped being a writer of science fiction, and the paradox of the phrase is that science fiction is living fact.